In Africa, it takes a village to raise a child. In America, it takes a village to ruin a child.

The virtual American village is as dominating and influential as the pristine African village. Its tentacles come into your home through the television, Internet, video games, outside you door, all around you at work and sticks to your cloth as you huddle back home at the end of the day.

For an African family, armed with the tools used by their parents to raise them, once in America those tools are rendered obsolete. In some cases they are labeled “dangerous weapons” that could not be used on a child. With the only tools at their disposal taken away, African parents are at a loss as to what to do. The concepts of Reinforcement and Time Out are foreign and less effective.

Meanwhile, African children born in America grow up coming from a direction that the parents are unfamiliar with. A friend of mine, frustrated by his inability to understand his children, once exclaimed, “Well, these are American children.”

It is a lot easier to raise girls than boys. By virtue of being born a boy in America, African boys become part of the endangered species called black men. The odds are stacked immediately against him. It does not matter if he grew up in the suburb or in the city, before the age of 20 more than white boys or Asians chances are that he will go to jail, that he will drop out of school, join a gang, take illegal drugs, and have kids. The statistics are staggering.

Boys are generally more aggressive. For black boys, such aggression is given a negative connotation. It doesn't take long before boys are labeled with a form of syndrome or deficiency.

The challenge of raising a boy is compounded with the reality of absentee parents, unstable home environment and dethronement of genuine spiritual guidance at home. Even when in marriage, many African parents are busy going from one job to another. They have no time to monitor how their boys are doing, provide guidance and support. Most boys are essentially raised by the violent pictures they see on TV and things they learn from friends.

Without providing the role model needed, it does not take time before the African boy absorbs the predominant thinking of the American black boys who the whole society is against them. They succumb to a male-bashing culture. It kills the can-do attitude that saw his parents through the pangs of immigration. In our eyes many of them degenerate to the low end of the ladder in all statistical areas.

Essentially the African abroad works very hard to give his or her children the things they did not have as kids. But in the process, they forget to give them the things that they had. Even when they remember to do so, the society has tied their hands. The new tools needed for such to be accomplished are far beyond reach.

Now that is a dilemma the village has not confronted in ages.

For Edewor Oke, (not real name), a Nigerian-American immigrant in New York, it is a tale of one heartache after the other in the raising and progress of his three boys in Brooklyn. Oke's sons range in age from 16 to 25. They have not turned out the way he would have like them to be. As an immigrant with three professional degrees, he had hoped that his sons will grow up to be doctors, lawyers and other professionals, but this had not happened. Instead, the senior boy, who dropped out of college, has taken to wearing braids like the other boys in the neighborhood. His younger bother has not fared well either. At age 20, he bluntly told his father that college was not for him and that “education was overrated” and would like to become a barber! Oke's last son, who is just 16, it appears, is also following in his elder brother's footsteps. When asked what he would like to become in life, he told his stunned parents that he wants to be a dancer. Oke and his wife, married for four decades, have not been able to figure out where they went wrong.

Kofi Asamoah and his wife Susan (not real names), Ghanaian Americans who emigrated to the United States 15 years ago with their two sons, have come to see America in a different light. When they were leaving Kumasi, Ghana to chase their American dream, they little bargained that it would become a nightmare. Now their two boys, on whom they placed high hopes in following in their footsteps to success, (the husband is a lawyer and the wife is a nurse), have really taken a different road. The older one, Victor (not his real name), who is 22, has had a running battle with the law. Having joined the wrong crowd, Victor has been arrested thrice and convicted twice. His arrest record is sealed. The younger one, Tony, quit school and now wants to be a rap artist, wearing oversized jeans below his buttocks and walking with a swagger in his Bronx neighborhood.

Now the Asamoahs confess to friends that sometimes they feel like their children are strangers in the house, because of the strange and weird behavior they put up in the house. They have contemplated relocating back to Ghana in frustration over the boys’ lack of ambition

AFRICAN ABROAD-USA chat with experts on the problems of raising African boys in America who reveal that the larger problems of raising black boys in America has spread to the African community. An AA-USA survey shows that even though many African families in the United States have two parents, in three out of five African households, the results of under achievement and self-doubt have taken root.

Some of the reasons for this, the survey shows, range from peer pressure prevalent in public schools, gang activities and ineffective parental supervision caused by parents having to put in long hours at work, while some of these boys are giving free range to be misled by peers. According to the survey, many African immigrants, including the well-educated ones with medical training, hold down two permanent jobs or more, making adequate parental supervision impossible.

The two cases cited above are only the tip off the iceberg in the dysfunction of raising boys in the United States. There are many cases where boys have been taken from African parents due to poor parental control and placed in foster homes and in prisons, while many boys have underperformed. The findings also showed that a very small percentage of African boys have achieved success even though they grew up in America. One difference in this group is [for boys who come] from high-income families who are able to send their boys to private school, where peer pressure is at its lowest.

Many Africans seeing the problems playing the education and raising of black boys have been looking for ways to solve them. African boys are being sent back to Africa to get an education mixed with discipline, [enrolling them] in private schools and exposing them to high achiever African immigrants through Church and Mosque attendance, as well as social parties, where three-piece suits and the latest luxury cars are common place. According to a pastor, who does not want his name in print, there is no way to draw it home to a young adolescent that a suit is to be preferred to baggy jeans of the projects and that a household with a father and a mother is preferable to the many who don't want to be father to their children.